


Darkness Feeds

by SilenceIsGolden15



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo 2k18 [21]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Claustrophobia, Gen, Hurt Keith (Voltron), Prompt: Sensory Deprivation, Protective Shiro (Voltron), Sensory Deprivation, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 10:38:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16596269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilenceIsGolden15/pseuds/SilenceIsGolden15
Summary: The Galra have some interesting torture techniques under their belts.





	Darkness Feeds

Takashi Shirogane had been knocked unconscious many times in his life. Probably too many for the average person. So having his eyes close in one place and open in another shouldn’t be a new experience for him, but for some reason it never failed to be disorienting as all hell. 

When he came to with the required pounding headache, he wasn’t surprised to find himself staring up at purple metal. Because that’s just how predictable his life was at this point. 

Other groans in the room told him he wasn’t alone (the team, right, he couldn’t just lay around and be wry to himself) and when he turned his head he counted three other forms in the cell in white armor, just beginning to stir. 

He blinked a couple times, trying to clear his eyes enough to differentiate colors in the low light of Galra prison cells. Yellow, blue, and green. Someone was missing. 

That’s what finally got him to sit up and do a proper catalogue of his surroundings. An empty cell just big enough to hold the four of them and give them space to move around. They weren’t cuffed and they haven’t had their armor removed except for their helmets, though he would’ve been surprised if the others hadn’t been relieved of their bayards. To his right about a quarter of the wall was metal with a reinforced door barely visible, and the rest was made of something that was clear like glass but was probably far stronger. 

Through the glass was an empty hallway, except for the sarcophagus-like black box set against the opposite wall, staring in on them. Shiro dismissed it with a shudder and turned back to the team.

“Sound off, everybody.” 

Pidge groaned from where she lay flat on her face. “Pidge here.”

“Lance here,” said the Blue Paladin, slumped against the back wall and rubbing his temples with a ticked-off expression. 

“Hunk here, and ow, my head hurts, does anyone else’s head hurt?”

“Everyone’s head hurts, Hunk,” Pidge answered irritably as she pushed herself upright. Shiro wasn’t paying attention to the banter; he was too busy trying to swallow his heart back down to where it belonged.

“We’re missing Keith.”

All of them immediately scrambled to their feet, but there wasn’t much to be done. The cell was empty, there wasn’t anywhere to hide. Keith simply wasn’t there. 

Shiro took a deep breath-- in, two, three, four-- and let it out-- five, six, seven, eight. Don’t jump to worst case scenarios. Maybe Keith got away and was launching a rescue mission with Allura and Coran as they spoke. Just because he wasn’t in the cell didn’t mean he was being hurt. One more practiced breath and he was able to shove the anxiety to the back of his mind and put his leader hat back on.

“Ok, we should--”

The sound of a metal door screeching open interrupted him and the group fell in together, moving on instinct to cover each others backs, exactly the way they’d practiced on the training deck so many times. 

Shiro didn’t have time to feel proud. The person who’d entered the cell block strode into view through the glass wall and stopped, hands clasped behind them and a smug smirk on their lips. He was Galra (obviously) with fin-like ears and two tusks protruding from his lower lip like some kind of fantasy character. The purple insignia emblazoned on his chest plate was a familiar one-- the mark of an interrogator. 

Brilliant.

Shiro raised his chin defiantly, knowing without looking that the others would be mirroring his expression. But the man was nonplussed by their stony looks and merely continued to smirk at them.

“Paladins--”

“We’re not telling you anything,” Lance cut in belligerently. The interrogator raised the ridges over his eyes where brows would be if he had them, apparently amused.

“So quick to refuse. Wouldn’t you like to know where your teammate is?”

Shiro’s breath caught in his chest, and judging by the sounds that whispered around him, he wasn’t the only one. The Galra’s smirk widened, but Shiro shook his head at the others questioning looks. They weren’t going to play along. 

The interrogator waited for a minute, but when he realized they weren’t going to say anything else, began to pace back and forth in front of the glass. 

“He hasn’t gone far,” he said, conversationally, as though they were sitting in a living room discussing a missing cat, “And he’s unharmed. For now. Though the longer you refuse to cooperate, the worse it’ll get for your Red Paladin.”

Shiro gulped and clenched his fists. “How do we know you even have him? You could be lying.”

The smirk widened into a yellow-fanged grin that made Shiro’s stomach twist. Turning his back to the glass, the interrogator strode across the hall to the black box and rapped his knuckles against the front of it. 

After a moment of silence, there was an answering, angry thump from inside. Chaos immediately erupted amongst the Paladins.

“Let him out!” Pidge shrieked, throwing herself at the glass like a Tasmanian Devil. “Let him out right now or I swear to quiznack--”

“Can he even breathe?” Hunk was fretting, wringing his hands up around his neck. “Is he gonna suffocate?”

Lance was swearing up a storm, the inflection of his voice saying that it was in Spanish even if the translators automatically changed the words. He had some very creative insults prepared. 

But Shiro… Shiro was dead silent. His prosthetic creaked when he clenched his fists too hard, nails pushing into his human palm through the tough material of his flight suit. 

He could remember. Suffocating darkness. Nothing to hear but his own too-loud breathing and the pounding of his heart in his ears. Muscles aching from being forced to stand in the narrow space, not enough room to slump down. Hours passing that felt like eternities, until he was seeing colors and people in the shadows that couldn’t have possibly been there and insects crawled on his skin and he felt like he was going to go  _ insane-- _

The interrogator was laughing at them. Keith probably couldn’t hear their voices from inside the evil contraption, but it still made Shiro’s blood boil even as his legs grew cold from fear. 

“What do you want?” He whispered hoarsely, and everyone else in the room fell to stunned silence. The interrogator preened. 

“I don’t think I’ll tell you just yet,” he said, bragging, mocking, “I think I’ll let you stew for a bit, make sure that whatever you tell me is true--”

“No!” Shiro shoved forward against the glass until he was even with Pidge. He knew his voice and his expression would be desperate and pathetic but he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t let Keith stay in there. He had to get him  _ out.  _ “No, I’ll tell you now, you don’t have to--”

Lance pulled him back by his elbow. “Shiro, are you crazy?” His hissed with burning eyes, but Shiro didn’t even look at him. His eyes were locked on the Galra as he turned to leave the room. 

“I’ll be back in a few vargas for your answers, Paladins!” He cackled back at them before the door slammed shut again. Shiro felt like a bucket of ice water had been dumped on his head and was shivering to match it, even as the others turned to demand what the hell he’d been thinking, giving himself up like that. 

He couldn’t answer. All he could think about was Keith. A few hours, he said. Hours for Keith to be locked in there. His human hand gripped at his bangs without him telling it to. 

“Woah, Shiro, are you ok?” When he blinked it was Hunk standing in front of him, looking painfully concerned, one of his hands carefully pulling Shiro’s away from his hair. Shiro’s throat was so tight all he could do was shake his head. 

“It’ll be ok,” said Lance from the corner. His words were negated by the anxious way he chewed on his lip. “It’s just sensory deprivation. People back home do that to relax. He’ll be fine.”

“Not for hours on end, Lance,” Pidge answered. She had a screen pulled up on her gauntlet and was standing near the door, probably trying to sort out some way to hack through it. “On Earth we developed sound proofing so good you’d start hallucinating within forty five minutes. Who knows what the Galra have?”

Shiro swallowed hard and made himself speak. “I do. I know. It’s awful.” A ripple of sadness went around the room but he continued before he could let it simmer. “And Keith is-- he’s claustrophobic, he can’t--”

Pidge swore low under her breath and typed at her screen just a tad faster. Then they all froze at the bang that came from inside the box. It was immediately followed by another, and another, and another, Keith trying to break out with just his fists. Shiro cringed at the thought of what his knuckles were going to look like later, though it wasn’t like he could tell him to stop.

“Can he hear us?” Hunk asked, going a shade paler when Shiro shook his head. 

Being as stubborn as Keith was, the banging didn’t stop, and after two minutes Shiro couldn’t take it anymore and began to pace across the cell. Hunk and Lance obligingly moved to the corners to give him space, Hunk hovering near Pidge and trying to help her hack through the door. Judging by their facial expressions it wasn’t going too well. 

It was another ten minutes before the noises from the box began to slow, the thumps becoming quieter and fewer, until they stopped entirely. Shiro’s eyes burned as he imagined Keith in the darkness, giving up, slumping against the door and making that ugly face that he did whenever he was trying not to cry and suddenly he just could not take this anymore.

Storming up to the glass, he powered up his prosthetic and slammed his fist into it. It bounced off, but he just grit his teeth and hit it again. 

“Shiro!”

“What are you  _ doing--” _

“Stop!”

Even powered up his prosthetic wasn’t so much as scratching the damn glass, but Shiro wouldn’t stop. Couldn’t. He couldn’t just sit here and do nothing while Keith was suffering--

Hunk grabbed his arm and physically pulled him away from the window. 

“Let me go! Hunk--”

“You’re not helping.” Hunk’s voice was unusually stern, enough that it made Shiro stop struggling for a moment. “All you’re gonna do is tire yourself out. Just let me and Pidge handle it.”

Shiro choked on a sob, but when Hunk let him go reluctantly slunk to the back of the cell and sank to the floor, putting his head on his knees. Lance sat beside him, a silent support. 

Time dragged. 

He’d never seen Pidge and Hunk have this much trouble with an engineering problem before. Pidge tried to explain it, tried to talk him and Lance through it in an attempt to see the problem better, but all Shiro was getting was that the door controls were so far removed from the central control hub of the ship that tracking down exactly which function would open exactly this door was taking a while. 

Shiro could do nothing but sit there, and brood, and remember, and try not to completely lose his mind.

An hour passed. Two. Two and a half. Shiro was back to pacing, Hunk was methodically picking at the metal seams on the wall to try and directly access the doors wiring, and Pidge was growling under her breath as she tried and failed again and again to find the correct control. Lance sat on the floor and bounced a knee, staring out the window at the box. 

Three hours passed (according to the timer on Pidge’s gauntlet) and Shiro was this close to snapping. There hadn’t been a sound from Keith in ages, his nerves were rubbed raw by memories he hadn’t had time to process, and the moment that interrogator stepped back into the room Shiro would gladly tell him anything he wanted to hear if he’d only let Keith out. 

Thankfully it didn’t come to that point, because at three hours and seventeen minutes the floor underneath them jarred, and from somewhere deep within the ship came a familiar angry roar.

“Jeez, took Red long enough,” Lance griped, but it didn’t make Shiro feel any better. He knew from the Trials exactly how distressed Keith had to be to trigger a response from Red. 

For a couple of minutes all they could do was stand and listen to Red’s furious roaring from several decks down. But they were getting louder, and the movement of the floor becoming worse, until eventually there was an impact  _ directly underneath them  _ that had all of them stumbling, fighting not to fall over.

It also caused a tiny crack in the corner of the glass window.

The crack spiderwebbed at the next hit (presumably from Red’s head against the underside of the floor) and Shiro didn’t waste any time. Two carefully placed punches from his metal arm was enough to have the glass shattering and in seconds he was in front of the box, tearing it open while the crunching of glass under boots told him that the other Paladins were following. 

Keith fell free of the box, distressingly small on the inside, and collapsed against Shiro’s chestplate. Then he promptly panicked, shoving himself away and planting his hands over his ears at the sudden influx of voices and metal creaking and alarms blaring. His legs were too wobbly to support him and he went down, Shiro following and carefully, as gently as he could despite how Keith jerked away in response to his touch, making sure he didn’t get slashed on the glass covering the floor. The Paladins’ babbling voices weren’t helping.

“What’s going on?”

“Is he ok?”

“Shiro, what do we do?”

“Everyone be quiet,” he instructed, barely managing to keep himself from snapping. They all obeyed and even Red seemed to go still, leaving only the distant hum of alarms and Keith’s heaving breaths. 

He was a mess. Tears were streaming down his face and dripping off of his chin. Even the low light in the room seemed to be too much as he had his eyes screwed as tightly shut as he could make them. His hands, still pressed over his ears, dripped with blood from split knuckles and torn nails-- he’d probably tried to claw his way out at some point. 

Shiro murmured quiet nonsense to him, trailing his hands up and down Keith’s arms as lightly as he could, trying to get him used to being touched again. He could remember how the rough hands of the Galra guards had felt like needles being forced into him when he’d been through this-- coming out was almost as bad as being stuck inside.

Keith’s eyes were glazed when they finally opened, pupils dilated far too wide. He flinched at the light and blinked rapidly before he semi-focused on Shiro’s face. 

“Sh-shiro?” His voice cracked. 

Shiro forced the best smile he could. “Hey, bud. Not feeling too great huh?”

Keith didn’t respond to his words. Instead his eyes filled with more tears that he didn’t bother to wipe away. 

“Shiro, I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry, please don’t go, please don’t leave me again--”

Somehow, through the tightness in his throat, Shiro managed a soothing sound and gently pulled Keith into his shoulder, slight relief filtering in when he felt Keith’s arms latch onto him. 

“It wasn’t me,” he murmured into his hair. “It wasn’t real.”

“Shiro,” Keith whimpered back. “I… I wanna go home…”

“Yeah, ok, we’ll go home. Red’s close, she can take you home.”

His grip tightened. “Don’t go.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”  

 


End file.
